Please, give us some games that use this Every PC flight simulator shipped in the last 3 years supports at least 2 axis head tracking systems, and some support the full 6 axis systems. It's gotten to the point where everyone playing multiplayer combat flight simulators uses a TrackIR system.
Maybe I missed the point of this, but I don't see how scientific laws can be anything BUT a description of nature. We're not creating laws. I can't write a law saying gravity doesn't exist. Scientific laws/theories are merely descriptions of nature.
There's always the chance that there really isn't a reliable pattern to the behavior of the universe. Or as a stockbroker might say "past performance does not guarantee future returns." There's an infinitesimally tiny chance that entirely random behavior could result in the universe we see today, but with an infinite number of universes, an infinite subset will have a past that looks exactly like ours, even if there are no physical laws to direct its behavior.
Of course, if that is the case, the it is nearly certain that the universe will stop behaving in a logical and orderly manner right now. Since it still is behaving in a logical manner, I'd say that there are three possible explanations.
The physical law do exist. OR
Our experience is limited to the universes in which things behave as if there were physical laws. In the multitude of universes where behavior became random, we all ceased to exist, leaving us only this subset of universes to experience. OR
The universe is entirely deterministic and the future is a single path which we must follow.
I've met Paul a few times. He's fun, if a bit off the wall from time to time.
Ah, here it is: Microwaved Water and Plants. I would like to see someone replicate this in the lab, thus far nobody has been able to reproduce her result.
Not exactly a double blind study is it? Sure it was only a 6th grade science fair, but that 6th grade science teacher deserves an F on his/or her teaching skills.
It's also funny the way using "microwaved water" causes the leave and stems of plants to be clipped off, as if by scissors. Its almost as if the teacher told the student that getting a measurable result was more important than getting a correct result. Then again it's 6th grade, who cares how much you screw up the kids brains... Someone will fix their brains in high school or college, right?
My wife has a young cousin who attends one of the "lesser" U.C. schools. She was telling us over the Thanksgiving holiday how her Chemistry T.A. is encouraging the students to fudge their lab results to get the "right" answer. If you're encouraged to cheat on a crappy little chem lab, what do you think these students are going to do later in life when prestige, grant money or their careers are on the line? Suddenly do the right thing?
Are you sure about that? Considering that the British NHS costs about $200 million a year, and America having five times the population, it would cost at least a trillion dollars a year, over twice the budget of the entire US military.
And it would still be far less than the US currently spends on health care (about 1.7 trillion dollars for the last year could find data for (2003)). I can think of a few things I would like to do with my share of that extra 700 billion.
America's debt is about 65% of its GDP right now - how does your debt compare to your income, and what does the bank think of you as a credit risk?
I'm sorry, but where the national debt is concerned, the appropriate figure is not GDP but tax revenues. U.S. 2006 Tax revenues were 2.4 trillion dollars compared with 9.1 trillion in debt. If my unsecured debt were 3.1 times my annual income, I would be worried about my ability to pay. And I doubt that any bank would give me an unsecured loan for 3.1 times my annual income.
Then again I can't just devalue the currency in order to reduce my debt.
She visits the site. She is aware of its existence. She has participated in its development. She has given implied consent to its existence.
Now all of a sudden she has decided it is a copyright violation. Apparently it wasn't yesterday, but today it is because the owners want to make money from it.
The intent of the owners does NOT change whether the site is a copyright violation. If it wasn't a violation yesterday, its not a violation today just because someone might make a penny.
Haven't you made enough fucking money off this crap anyway?
How about we stop wasting so much valuable energy on unnecessary transportation?
How about we stop wasting so much money on entertainment?
How about we stop wasting so much food on livestock and become vegetarians?
Apparently you are under the assumption that we should devote all of our resources to only one thing. More people die of cancer than AIDS, so following your logic all AIDS research should be stopped because it diverts funding away from cancer research.
BTW, the writer of TFA has nothing to do with SETI@home.
I'm trying to figure out why Seth wrote this... Or a least what he chose that title... Is he looking to piss people off? Is he assuming that SETI is only worth it if we find something? I think my contributions to signal processing and public resource distributed computing far exceed the pittance I have been paid for it.
SETI is not taxpayer funded, it's funded by donations. If you don't want to donate don't. If you want to donate, please do. (See link below)
Bitching about SETI seems to be the new Slashdot hobby.
If you just want to bitch, then bitch about something that costs real money and returns nothing. Like, for example, the Iraq war. One week in Iraq costs more than all of the money ever spent on SETI. Feel like you're getting your money's worth?
For that matter the final two seasons of Frasier cost more than the Allen Telescope Array has. Do you think that was a bargain? Maybe that money should have got to medical research...
An airburst should leave multiple craters. After all, the pieces have to go someplace. Whether or not we can find those smaller craters after a century is another issue...
It did go somewhere. You're breathing it now.
I think you may have a misconception as to why an airburst occurs. A meteor (or comet) enters the atmosphere and is decelerated by interacting with the air. To first order the rate of deceleration (and therefore the stress on the meteor) is related to the ratio of the surface area of the object to its mass. If the deceleration stress exceeds the tensile strength of the material it will fragment. If you break an object into multiple pieces, you've increased the surface area but left the total mass the same. The net effect that fragmenting increases the stress and results in more fragmentation and more rapid deceleration. Once fragmentation starts it doesn't like to stop. It progresses very rapidly and all of the kinetic energy gets turned into heat in a few microseconds.
Another way of thinking about it is that it would be hard to get solid pieces surviving after a 15 megaton airburst. Pick your favorite 60 meter diameter piece of rock. Put a 15 Mton H-bomb on it and set if off. Tell me home much of your rock is left.
One figure of merit in the space business is energy expended per bit transmitted. At 1.4 kbps from a 10 watt transmitter, each bit trasmitted costs 7.1 mJ of energy.
Now lets assume that we've got a 10 W green laser with a 10cm primary mirror on the transmitter with 1.40 arcsecond resolution.
At 24 billion km distance that turns out to be a flux of 330 photons per second per square meter. Lets assume that our detectors have low background (i.e. we're photon limited) and that we want a bit error rate of 1e-6 and a detection threshold of 3 photons, so we'll require an average of 15 photons per bit, and for simplicity sake we'll assume we're using a compact encoding. We'll want, at the minimum, to replicate that 1.4 kbps that the radio transmitter gets.
So we need to receive 21000 photons/second, which corresponds to a telescope area of 64 m^2 or, equivalently a 9 meter effective diameter primary. Keck would do nicely, but might be a bit more expensive than the Goldstone antenna. If you want to do twice the bit rate of the radio tranmitter, you'll need both Keck telescopes or a 13 meter telescope.
In other words, lasers aren't quite the panacea for interplanetary communications that they might seem to be at first. You can increase bandwidth by increasing the size of the receiving telescope, but you can do that with radio, too. It just cost money. You usually don't have the option of increasing the size or power of the sending side in either case. For radio, big dish antennas are heavy. For optical, sub-arcsecond pointing systems are heavy and expensive.
With the proper optical equipment, we could shoot a laser from Alpha Centauri that hit the earth and nothing but the earth.
It's not quite so easy as you make it sound. You'd need a telescope with an imaging resolution of 32 microarcseconds, so you're talking about a primary mirror 4 km in diameter. That might be technically feasible in the moderate term future, but getting it to Alpha Centauri might be a bit of a challenge.
OK, lets say you got it there. Now you have to point it with that accuracy at where the earth is going to be when the laser gets there. The relative velocity of Alpha Centauri and the sun is 32.1 km/s and we might know that to a precision of about 0.1 km/s. So in the 4.365 years that the laser beam travels, the uncertainty in the position of the sun is about 14 million kilometers or over 1000 earth diameters. In other words, you missed.
But our precision in measuring velocity is continually increasing, so lets assume that somehow we've determined the relative velocity with perfect accuracy. Even so, there is the uncertainty in the distance to Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is 4.365±0.007 light years away. In 0.007 years the relative velocity of the Sun and Alpha Centauri adds up to 7.1 million kilometers or over 500 earth diameters. Add in the orbital velocity of the earth around the sun, and you've probably missed by 10 million kilometers.
Maybe you'll want a more powerful laser and a smaller telescope to blanket the inner solar system rather than trying to target a specific planet.
You can't register a vehicle (i.e. get a license plate) without insurance. Driving without insurance is illegal.
It works that way here in California, too. The issue is that (in this state at least) illegal immigrants can't get a driver's license. Because they can't get a driver's license they can't get insurance. Because they can't get insurance, they can't register their vehicles.
Of course none of that changes the necessity of owning and driving a car in California. So illegal immigrants never get any official driver training. But they'll still buy a car and they get stolen or forged plates and forged registrations stickers.
Now imagine that you're an illegal immigrant who is an untrained and unlicensed driver, driving your uninsured vehicle with forged plates and you get into an a accident and someone in the other vehicle is injured. Your choices that this point are:
Stay around and provide assistance until the police arrive, at which point you will be jailed and, either before or after your sentence is complete, deported.
Run like the wind, leaving the injured party to pay the bills or lose everything, depending upon the severity of the injury and the quality of their insurance.
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the vast majority choose the latter option. Somehow the people who oppose licensing illegal immigrants feel this is as it should be.
However, a little psychology might tell you that given the option of following the laws, most people will. Having a license in incentive NOT to do those things that can cause you to lose your license. Not to mention that I'd rather that everyone on the road at least have some rudimentary training in operating a vehicle and following the rules of the road.
Now we pause for the inevitable "you're talking about rewarding people for breaking the laws" crap.
Of those who were willing to pay, the largest percentage (17 percent) paid less than $4.
Yet, if one looks at the article, 56 percent of those who paid for the album (22 percent of downloaders) paid more than $4. Apparently in new math 22<17.
I wonder if the the author of TFA has an agenda or is just a math illiterate? If you change the bin size in a histogram you can change what "the largest percentage" (the bin with the most data points) paid.
I think this shows that you have a grave misunderstanding about how SETI@home, SERENDIP, META, and BETA work and how the are very interrelated. In fact, if you go the the BETA page, you will see "The FFT processor evolved from a design of the Berkeley SETI group."
SERENDIP, META, and BETA are essentially simple FFT processors, with BETA essentially being four 80 million channel analyzers. That is proof that to an astronomer 240 million is equal to a billion. SERENDIP IV (the last one deployed) was a 168 million channel analyzer. Both had channel widths of about 0.5 Hz (0.5 Hz for BETA, 0.6 Hz for SERENDIP). The channel width limits the sensitivity. Simple FFT analyzers cannot go to narrower channels without correcting for Doppler drift which will chirp the signal out of the channel in less than the integration time, and because the Doppler drift depends upon the properties of the transmitter in addition to the motion of the Earth, it's not a simple process that can be done on the fly.
SETI@home implements coherent dechirping which allows for channel widths of 0.075 Hz or less. In essence you are changing maximum coherent integration time on a signal from 2 seconds to (in SETI@home) about 13 seconds for simple (single time bin) signals. In addition SETI@home searches at higher sensitivity for multi-time-bin signals with up to 107 seconds integration. SETI@home also searches for repeated (fixed period) pulsed signals, which none of the special purpose instruments can do.
Now add the consideration that SETI@home (and the Berkeley SERENDIP instruments) uses a telescope with a collecting area 140 times as large as the telescope used by BETA.
If you calculate the maximum value of the processing power of BETA, (a 240 million point FFT every 2 seconds) you get 16 GFLOPS. That's an overestimate because a) it's not a floating point processor, but an integer processor, and b) it's implemented as sixty three 4 million point tranforms.
SETI@home, on the other hand, currently cannot handle real-time data from the ALFA instrument because it only has about 1/3 of the 1.2 PFLOPS it needs to process at that rate. In other words to do the same processing as SETI@home does, you need to build 75000 BETAs.
That's not to say BETA (and the SERENDIPs on which it was based) wasn't worth the effort. At the time it was among the best. SERENDIP V will eventually take over where SERENDIP IV left off, so the age of the SETI hardware based spectrometer isn't over. And yes, the ATA will have a hardware based spectrometer. And no, for reasons I mentioned elsewhere, SETI@home is unlikely to be given access to the ATA.
If Berkley was really serious about SETI, they'd have fitted a META (MillionChannel, Extra-Terrestrial Array - http://seti.harvard.edu/seti/meta.html) or a BETA (BillionChannel Extra-Terrestrial Array - http://seti.harvard.edu/seti/setihist.html) to process it. It actually takes about as much hardware for a META as is needed for the backend of the BOINC client.
I think this shows that you have a grave misunderstanding about how SETI@home, SERENDIP, META, and BETA work and how the are very interrelated. In fact, if you go the the BETA page, you will see "The FFT processor evolved from a design of the Berkeley SETI group."
SERENDIP, META, and BETA are essentially simple FFT processors, with BETA essentially being four 80 million channel analyzers. That is proof that to an astronomer 240 million is equal to a billion. SERENDIP IV (the last one deployed) was a 168 million channel analyzer. Both had channel widths of about 0.5 Hz (0.5 Hz for BETA, 0.6 Hz for SERENDIP). The channel width limits the sensitivity. Simple FFT analyzers cannot go to narrower channels without correcting for Doppler drift which will chirp the signal out of the channel in less than the integration time, and because the Doppler drift depends upon the properties of the transmitter in addition to the motion of the Earth, it's not a simple process that can be done on the fly.
SETI@home implements coherent dechirping which allows for channel widths of 0.075 Hz or less. In essence you are changing maximum coherent integration time on a signal from 2 seconds to (in SETI@home) about 13 seconds for simple (single time bin) signals. In addition SETI@home searches at higher sensitivity for multi-time-bin signals with up to 107 seconds integration. SETI@home also searches for repeated (fixed period) pulsed signals, which none of the special purpose instruments can do.
Now add the consideration that SETI@home (and the Berkeley SERENDIP instruments) uses a telescope with a collecting area 140 times as large as the telescope used by BETA.
If you calculate the maximum value of the processing power of BETA, (a 240 million point FFT every 2 seconds) you get 16 GFLOPS. That's an overestimate because a) it's not a floating point processor, but an integer processor, and b) it's implemented as sixty three 4 million point tranforms.
SETI@home, on the other hand, currently cannot handle real-time data from the ALFA instrument because it only has about 1/3 of the 1.2 PFLOPS it needs to process at that rate. In other words to do the same processing as SETI@home does, you need to build 75000 BETAs.
That's not to say BETA (and the SERENDIPs on which it was based) wasn't worth the effort. At the time it was among the best. SERENDIP V will eventually take over where SERENDIP IV left off, so the age of the SETI hardware based spectrometer isn't over.
More confusion in the media (and on Slashdot) about just what SETI is. SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a field of study, like physics for example. You wouldn't say "Physics gets a new particle accelerator," would you? It is not a project or a program.
The SETI Institute is an organization that employs many scientists. A few of the scientists there do SETI (i.e. they search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The vast majority do not. The SETI Institute, in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, are building a telescope called the Allen Telescope Array. Some of the scientists at the SETI Institute will use it for SETI. Other astronomers will use it for non-SETI related projects.
SETI@home is a project at the University of California Berkeley. It is neither funded by nor affiliated with the SETI Institute. In fact, some SETI scientists at the SETI Institute, dislike SETI@home because it directs attention (and therefore funding) away from SETI Institute projects. Competing projects also have some at the institute worried that someone else may be the first to detect extraterrestrial intelligence. For those reasons it is unlikely that SETI@home will ever be allowed to utilize data from the Allen Telescope Array.
From my vantage point, it appears that this confusion is promulgated by the SETI Institute. They would like the world to think that they are in control of all SETI related projects, and they would very much like to control all SETI related funding. At this point they feel that there is no advantage to preventing this confusion. In fact, scientists at the SETI Institute often drop the word "Institute" when they mention their affiliation, and just say they are "from SETI" or "with SETI".
The subject in "Fuck you" is an understood "you" the same way it is in the sentence "Fuck me" or "Bite me." This is the standard English imperative form. The grammatically incorrect portion is the object of the verb, which would more properly be "yourself." However, in common usage, "Fuck yourself" is rarely uttered, and by that token "Fuck you" is proper English.
The future imperative form "Go fuck yourself" is both gramatically correct and used in common speech.
Hmm...it seems the error in this article was that the reviewer forgot to FREEZE the cables, prior to listening.
But if you freeze them, you can't bombard them with neutrons afterward. Neutron bombardment MUST be performed before freezing, otherwise you get a harsh flavor caused by distortion above 11 kHz.
Try telling that to any one of the millions of oppressed people of the world. No, Ndrjk, you were BORN with constitutional rights. Have another government beating. And here's a female circumcision for your daughter! Oh , what's this? This is your SECOND daughter? Ok, we'll take her now, thank you. No need to be having TWO useless children!"
That's exactly the point. They were born with those rights and governments, by their very nature, will take those rights away if they are allowed. What stops that from happening here is the Constitution, and a bunch of people being willing to die (and kill if necessary) to protect it. I hope we don't have to find out soon whether we have enough of the latter to protect the former.
And how on earth can the claim that persons who do not live under the law derived from the Constitutional government are somehow deserving of the rights granted by that Constitution not sound idiotic?
You should try to read the Constitution some day. And after you have done so, point out the place where the Constitution grants rights to the people. Having trouble finding it? That's because the Constitution doesn't grant any rights to the people. The rights of the people exist outside of the Constitution. The Constitution lists the powers of the government. It also includes a list of some of the rights of the people that the government may not infringe. Those rights belong to all people. Other governments may infringe upon those rights, but that doesn't make the rights stop existing. The Constitution says our government may not infringe upon them. That is the power of the document and the strength of the United States.
And you and your kind want desperately to fuck it up. What the hell are you so afraid of that you would sell the country's heart and soul?
I think it was actually "about" how spain lost its innocence during the civil war, using woman's suffering and the girl's imagination (denial?) as an analogy. It is still kinda what you mention, innocence == virginity.
Pseudospoiler alert:
Since it was written for a Spanish audience, I think you have it backwards. What followed the Spanish civil war, through the end of the Franco regime in 1974, is still fairly fresh in Spanish memories, while any memories of prior innocence are long gone. I think it was taking a trauma everyone (in Spain, at least) had some experience of, and linking it to the (unshared) trauma of an out of wedlock pregnancy and the subsequent decision to sever all ties with the father. Ofelia and Mercedes are two aspects of the same person (the virgin girl, the strong woman). Ofelia gives up "her kingdom" to "some little prick she hardly knows" which eventually results in the death of the girl and the birth of the woman. Ofelia dies, which gives Mercedes the strength to kill the baby's father and tell him that his son will never know his name.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, if that is the case, the it is nearly certain that the universe will stop behaving in a logical and orderly manner right now. Since it still is behaving in a logical manner, I'd say that there are three possible explanations.
- The physical law do exist. OR
- Our experience is limited to the universes in which things behave as if there were physical laws. In the multitude of universes where behavior became random, we all ceased to exist, leaving us only this subset of universes to experience. OR
- The universe is entirely deterministic and the future is a single path which we must follow.
I've met Paul a few times. He's fun, if a bit off the wall from time to time.Not exactly a double blind study is it? Sure it was only a 6th grade science fair, but that 6th grade science teacher deserves an F on his/or her teaching skills.
It's also funny the way using "microwaved water" causes the leave and stems of plants to be clipped off, as if by scissors. Its almost as if the teacher told the student that getting a measurable result was more important than getting a correct result. Then again it's 6th grade, who cares how much you screw up the kids brains... Someone will fix their brains in high school or college, right?
My wife has a young cousin who attends one of the "lesser" U.C. schools. She was telling us over the Thanksgiving holiday how her Chemistry T.A. is encouraging the students to fudge their lab results to get the "right" answer. If you're encouraged to cheat on a crappy little chem lab, what do you think these students are going to do later in life when prestige, grant money or their careers are on the line? Suddenly do the right thing?
Sorry bad math. 3.8 times not 3.1
Then again I can't just devalue the currency in order to reduce my debt.
Now all of a sudden she has decided it is a copyright violation. Apparently it wasn't yesterday, but today it is because the owners want to make money from it.
The intent of the owners does NOT change whether the site is a copyright violation. If it wasn't a violation yesterday, its not a violation today just because someone might make a penny.
Haven't you made enough fucking money off this crap anyway?
Apparently you are under the assumption that we should devote all of our resources to only one thing. More people die of cancer than AIDS, so following your logic all AIDS research should be stopped because it diverts funding away from cancer research.
BTW, the writer of TFA has nothing to do with SETI@home.
SETI is not taxpayer funded, it's funded by donations. If you don't want to donate don't. If you want to donate, please do. (See link below)
Bitching about SETI seems to be the new Slashdot hobby. If you just want to bitch, then bitch about something that costs real money and returns nothing. Like, for example, the Iraq war. One week in Iraq costs more than all of the money ever spent on SETI. Feel like you're getting your money's worth?
For that matter the final two seasons of Frasier cost more than the Allen Telescope Array has. Do you think that was a bargain? Maybe that money should have got to medical research...
I think you may have a misconception as to why an airburst occurs. A meteor (or comet) enters the atmosphere and is decelerated by interacting with the air. To first order the rate of deceleration (and therefore the stress on the meteor) is related to the ratio of the surface area of the object to its mass. If the deceleration stress exceeds the tensile strength of the material it will fragment. If you break an object into multiple pieces, you've increased the surface area but left the total mass the same. The net effect that fragmenting increases the stress and results in more fragmentation and more rapid deceleration. Once fragmentation starts it doesn't like to stop. It progresses very rapidly and all of the kinetic energy gets turned into heat in a few microseconds.
Another way of thinking about it is that it would be hard to get solid pieces surviving after a 15 megaton airburst. Pick your favorite 60 meter diameter piece of rock. Put a 15 Mton H-bomb on it and set if off. Tell me home much of your rock is left.
Now lets assume that we've got a 10 W green laser with a 10cm primary mirror on the transmitter with 1.40 arcsecond resolution.
At 24 billion km distance that turns out to be a flux of 330 photons per second per square meter. Lets assume that our detectors have low background (i.e. we're photon limited) and that we want a bit error rate of 1e-6 and a detection threshold of 3 photons, so we'll require an average of 15 photons per bit, and for simplicity sake we'll assume we're using a compact encoding. We'll want, at the minimum, to replicate that 1.4 kbps that the radio transmitter gets.
So we need to receive 21000 photons/second, which corresponds to a telescope area of 64 m^2 or, equivalently a 9 meter effective diameter primary. Keck would do nicely, but might be a bit more expensive than the Goldstone antenna. If you want to do twice the bit rate of the radio tranmitter, you'll need both Keck telescopes or a 13 meter telescope.
In other words, lasers aren't quite the panacea for interplanetary communications that they might seem to be at first. You can increase bandwidth by increasing the size of the receiving telescope, but you can do that with radio, too. It just cost money. You usually don't have the option of increasing the size or power of the sending side in either case. For radio, big dish antennas are heavy. For optical, sub-arcsecond pointing systems are heavy and expensive.
It's not quite so easy as you make it sound. You'd need a telescope with an imaging resolution of 32 microarcseconds, so you're talking about a primary mirror 4 km in diameter. That might be technically feasible in the moderate term future, but getting it to Alpha Centauri might be a bit of a challenge.
OK, lets say you got it there. Now you have to point it with that accuracy at where the earth is going to be when the laser gets there. The relative velocity of Alpha Centauri and the sun is 32.1 km/s and we might know that to a precision of about 0.1 km/s. So in the 4.365 years that the laser beam travels, the uncertainty in the position of the sun is about 14 million kilometers or over 1000 earth diameters. In other words, you missed.
But our precision in measuring velocity is continually increasing, so lets assume that somehow we've determined the relative velocity with perfect accuracy. Even so, there is the uncertainty in the distance to Alpha Centauri. Alpha Centauri is 4.365±0.007 light years away. In 0.007 years the relative velocity of the Sun and Alpha Centauri adds up to 7.1 million kilometers or over 500 earth diameters. Add in the orbital velocity of the earth around the sun, and you've probably missed by 10 million kilometers.
Maybe you'll want a more powerful laser and a smaller telescope to blanket the inner solar system rather than trying to target a specific planet.
Of course none of that changes the necessity of owning and driving a car in California. So illegal immigrants never get any official driver training. But they'll still buy a car and they get stolen or forged plates and forged registrations stickers.
Now imagine that you're an illegal immigrant who is an untrained and unlicensed driver, driving your uninsured vehicle with forged plates and you get into an a accident and someone in the other vehicle is injured. Your choices that this point are:
- Stay around and provide assistance until the police arrive, at which point you will be jailed and, either before or after your sentence is complete, deported.
- Run like the wind, leaving the injured party to pay the bills or lose everything, depending upon the severity of the injury and the quality of their insurance.
You probably won't be surprised to hear that the vast majority choose the latter option. Somehow the people who oppose licensing illegal immigrants feel this is as it should be.However, a little psychology might tell you that given the option of following the laws, most people will. Having a license in incentive NOT to do those things that can cause you to lose your license. Not to mention that I'd rather that everyone on the road at least have some rudimentary training in operating a vehicle and following the rules of the road.
Now we pause for the inevitable "you're talking about rewarding people for breaking the laws" crap.
I wonder if the the author of TFA has an agenda or is just a math illiterate? If you change the bin size in a histogram you can change what "the largest percentage" (the bin with the most data points) paid.
SERENDIP, META, and BETA are essentially simple FFT processors, with BETA essentially being four 80 million channel analyzers. That is proof that to an astronomer 240 million is equal to a billion. SERENDIP IV (the last one deployed) was a 168 million channel analyzer. Both had channel widths of about 0.5 Hz (0.5 Hz for BETA, 0.6 Hz for SERENDIP). The channel width limits the sensitivity. Simple FFT analyzers cannot go to narrower channels without correcting for Doppler drift which will chirp the signal out of the channel in less than the integration time, and because the Doppler drift depends upon the properties of the transmitter in addition to the motion of the Earth, it's not a simple process that can be done on the fly.
SETI@home implements coherent dechirping which allows for channel widths of 0.075 Hz or less. In essence you are changing maximum coherent integration time on a signal from 2 seconds to (in SETI@home) about 13 seconds for simple (single time bin) signals. In addition SETI@home searches at higher sensitivity for multi-time-bin signals with up to 107 seconds integration. SETI@home also searches for repeated (fixed period) pulsed signals, which none of the special purpose instruments can do.
Now add the consideration that SETI@home (and the Berkeley SERENDIP instruments) uses a telescope with a collecting area 140 times as large as the telescope used by BETA.
If you calculate the maximum value of the processing power of BETA, (a 240 million point FFT every 2 seconds) you get 16 GFLOPS. That's an overestimate because a) it's not a floating point processor, but an integer processor, and b) it's implemented as sixty three 4 million point tranforms.
SETI@home, on the other hand, currently cannot handle real-time data from the ALFA instrument because it only has about 1/3 of the 1.2 PFLOPS it needs to process at that rate. In other words to do the same processing as SETI@home does, you need to build 75000 BETAs.
That's not to say BETA (and the SERENDIPs on which it was based) wasn't worth the effort. At the time it was among the best. SERENDIP V will eventually take over where SERENDIP IV left off, so the age of the SETI hardware based spectrometer isn't over. And yes, the ATA will have a hardware based spectrometer. And no, for reasons I mentioned elsewhere, SETI@home is unlikely to be given access to the ATA.
SERENDIP, META, and BETA are essentially simple FFT processors, with BETA essentially being four 80 million channel analyzers. That is proof that to an astronomer 240 million is equal to a billion. SERENDIP IV (the last one deployed) was a 168 million channel analyzer. Both had channel widths of about 0.5 Hz (0.5 Hz for BETA, 0.6 Hz for SERENDIP). The channel width limits the sensitivity. Simple FFT analyzers cannot go to narrower channels without correcting for Doppler drift which will chirp the signal out of the channel in less than the integration time, and because the Doppler drift depends upon the properties of the transmitter in addition to the motion of the Earth, it's not a simple process that can be done on the fly.
SETI@home implements coherent dechirping which allows for channel widths of 0.075 Hz or less. In essence you are changing maximum coherent integration time on a signal from 2 seconds to (in SETI@home) about 13 seconds for simple (single time bin) signals. In addition SETI@home searches at higher sensitivity for multi-time-bin signals with up to 107 seconds integration. SETI@home also searches for repeated (fixed period) pulsed signals, which none of the special purpose instruments can do.
Now add the consideration that SETI@home (and the Berkeley SERENDIP instruments) uses a telescope with a collecting area 140 times as large as the telescope used by BETA.
If you calculate the maximum value of the processing power of BETA, (a 240 million point FFT every 2 seconds) you get 16 GFLOPS. That's an overestimate because a) it's not a floating point processor, but an integer processor, and b) it's implemented as sixty three 4 million point tranforms.
SETI@home, on the other hand, currently cannot handle real-time data from the ALFA instrument because it only has about 1/3 of the 1.2 PFLOPS it needs to process at that rate. In other words to do the same processing as SETI@home does, you need to build 75000 BETAs.
That's not to say BETA (and the SERENDIPs on which it was based) wasn't worth the effort. At the time it was among the best. SERENDIP V will eventually take over where SERENDIP IV left off, so the age of the SETI hardware based spectrometer isn't over.
The SETI Institute is an organization that employs many scientists. A few of the scientists there do SETI (i.e. they search for extraterrestrial intelligence). The vast majority do not. The SETI Institute, in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, are building a telescope called the Allen Telescope Array. Some of the scientists at the SETI Institute will use it for SETI. Other astronomers will use it for non-SETI related projects.
SETI@home is a project at the University of California Berkeley. It is neither funded by nor affiliated with the SETI Institute. In fact, some SETI scientists at the SETI Institute, dislike SETI@home because it directs attention (and therefore funding) away from SETI Institute projects. Competing projects also have some at the institute worried that someone else may be the first to detect extraterrestrial intelligence. For those reasons it is unlikely that SETI@home will ever be allowed to utilize data from the Allen Telescope Array.
From my vantage point, it appears that this confusion is promulgated by the SETI Institute. They would like the world to think that they are in control of all SETI related projects, and they would very much like to control all SETI related funding. At this point they feel that there is no advantage to preventing this confusion. In fact, scientists at the SETI Institute often drop the word "Institute" when they mention their affiliation, and just say they are "from SETI" or "with SETI".
taH pagh taHbe'
The future imperative form "Go fuck yourself" is both gramatically correct and used in common speech.
It's very informative....
And you and your kind want desperately to fuck it up. What the hell are you so afraid of that you would sell the country's heart and soul?
Since it was written for a Spanish audience, I think you have it backwards. What followed the Spanish civil war, through the end of the Franco regime in 1974, is still fairly fresh in Spanish memories, while any memories of prior innocence are long gone. I think it was taking a trauma everyone (in Spain, at least) had some experience of, and linking it to the (unshared) trauma of an out of wedlock pregnancy and the subsequent decision to sever all ties with the father. Ofelia and Mercedes are two aspects of the same person (the virgin girl, the strong woman). Ofelia gives up "her kingdom" to "some little prick she hardly knows" which eventually results in the death of the girl and the birth of the woman. Ofelia dies, which gives Mercedes the strength to kill the baby's father and tell him that his son will never know his name.